The immediate British casualty count was 20 men killed, 60 men wounded and 318 missing. Only 79 British and 81 Indian missing soldiers were later released by the Arabs (and some of these had been captured previously), so the count of men dead was in fact over 180. The 1/32nd Sikh Pioneers lost 30 men killed; being non-Muslim they stood little chance of survival if captured. The Manchester Regiment lost 3 officers and 131 NCOs and men killed; it is believed that around 100 prisoners from the Manchester Regiment were taken to Najaf and killed there.
The insurgents had won a great victory. The British, through ignorance of the land, its inhabitants and the effects of the climate, paid the price for breaking many rules of warfare that had been learned the hard way on the Indian North West Frontier.
Sadly the British Army commanders in the recent invasion of Iraq appeared unfamiliar with the 1920 campaign. If those commanders had disseminated the lessons of that campaign to their subordinates, then perhaps more understanding of the situation would have been apparent, resulting in less British body bags being transported to the rear and in less suffering being inflicted on the local population. Such a study would have been a fitting tribute to the British soldiers and their adversaries who fought and died in the country in 1920.
On familiar ground: lessons not learnt then (1920).
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